Hi everybody!

I’d like to thank everyone who has signed up for the Open Rights Group London Pub Meeting on monday evening – and to everyone who hasn’t signed up I exhort you come along, I’d love to see you.

Francis Davey (@fjmd1 on Twitter) will be dissecting the recently announced measures to implement the Digital Economy Act – approximately speaking it goes a bit like this – if someone accuses you of downloading stuff off of Bittorrent without copyright holders’ permission:

1. they complain to your ISP
2. your ISP sends you a letter
3. if you challenge the accusation/letter, you have to lay down 20 quid – refundable if you prove you’re not guilty (ie: prove a negative)
4. if you receive 3+ letters in a given year, you may be disconnected from your ISP and left to wither and die in an internet-free hinterland of society; or perhaps you may just have your bandwidth choked-down so that your entire family cannot watch iPlayer, play games, and/or have a very dodgy time filling in a tax self-assessment form while your teenager tries to do schoolwork.

It’s a bit like debtors’ prison – punishment for the whole family.

So if you think this is illiberal, disproportionate, or in some other way simply wrong or bad or stupid then please do come along on Monday and find out more.

– alec

ps: and if you are coming, it’s not mandatory but we do appreciate clicking the “I’M GOING” button on the Meetup website – knowing how many people are turning up helps us manage venue size and costs. Thanks!